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Lessons From The Neanderthal Baby That Wasn't

Sure, a lie can travel halfway around the world as the truth ties its shoes, but nonsense about cloning a Neanderthal baby can go even faster.

Last week, Der Spiegel, the German newspaper, ran a story on Harvard geneticist George Church and his wonderful book, Regenesis, in which he discussed whether it would be possible to create a clone of a Neanderthal. The hardest part, Church has said repeatedly, would be finding a modern woman willing to act as a surrogate – although then he proceeds to rattle off a list of necessary biotechnological innovations that would stagger a normal scientist but don’t scare him, because, of course, he’s George Church, and he’s been inventing breakthrough DNA sequencing technologies since you were in diapers.

Of course, complexity doesn’t always translate well. When the interview was initially posted in German, a slew of blog posts took Church’s comments to mean that he was ready to create a Neanderthal now, if only he can find a willing volunteer. Or, as the Daily Mail put it:

This morning, The Boston Herald got in touch with Church about the Neanderthal story. “The real story here is how these stories have percolated and changed in different ways,” Church told his local tabloid. “I’m sure we’ll get it sorted out eventually.” As for Neanderthal creation, he said: “I’m certainly not advocating it. I’m saying, if it is technically possible someday, we need to start talking about it today.” I contacted Church about the stories, asking if the Herald’s report was accurate. He wrote: “Yes the Boston Herald did a good job of cutting through many layers of viral web third-hand news.”

I’m surprised that normally sedate people ran with this “news.” The shame, to me, is that this kind of hyperventilating distracts from a lot of the really fascinating work that Church is doing. I’m in fact working on a story now (expect it soon) about genome-editing technology coming from his lab and elsewhere that could make it far easier to edit the genomes of human cells, and could, I think, revolutionize biotechnology. But talk of using these kinds of tools to make Neanderthals, or even mammoths, which present fewer ethical issues, is very, very far off. The Island of Dr. Moreau stuff really isn’t helping anybody.

Journalists and bloggers bear a lot of the blame here for being willing to publish third-hand-riffing on a translated quote that does not bear much resemblance to reality. But part of the blame should go to technology, too. All of us know that a big part of getting our stories read is getting picked up by Google News. And one thing that seems to work well is writing very fast, often assembling stories from quotes found elsewhere.

Google might actually have the ability to help slow the speed of future nonexistent Neanderthal babies. One positive step, which Google already takes, is to take the author of an article into account. Another step I’d recommend: make stories less likely to appear in search if they contain a quote that has already appeared somewhere else. There have got to be ways to use artificial intelligence to determine the difference between re-written news with minimal reporting, like this post, and original reporting. I’d personally be happy to make that trade.

Culturally, we would all do better to seek out primary sources more often. Instead of sharing the first link you read, comb back to find the original work. Sadly, that sounds a lot less likely to happen than a technical fix in Google’s algorithms.

Below are some real videos of George Church at Forbes’ recent Health Care Summit.

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The real problem is that Americans think The Daily Mail is a real British newspaper. It’s in fact the British equivalent of those supermarket tabloids that scream “Oprah’s pregnant!” and “Obama’s gay!” The Mail, however, specializes in fake medical and science stories based on crazy distortions of papers and quotes. Here’s one of many sites that track the Mail’s craziness: http://dailymailoncology.tumblr.com/

It is a fact of life (I think I could right a philosophy essay on the subject and name the principle after myself) that the difficult and important things we do in our work (on which we expend most of our energy) are oft overlooked while the trivial is heralded and receives much more attention.

This doesn’t apply if you are a worker who complains about not receiving enough recognition. Those of us who do get recognized have realized that it is often our less-impressive work that gets recognized while the things we work really hard on seem to go unnoticed.

A few years ago I ran the finances for our team (within a huge company with well over 100k employees). Our team had hundreds of people, tens of millions of dollars spent. I ran the top-level forecast, made sure we had the money, etc. Managed it to a variance less than one tenth of a percent. Rarely got a word of praise for it (which is fine). One day I realized that some internal training calls that we recorded and archived for later use were being stored by the vendor we were using on a site that could be accessed by any joe blow who happened to have the URL (which would have included any of their other customers). I mentioned the involved risk to my boss who passed it up the stream, and we got recognized by one of the CEO’s direct reports for identifying an important risk.

It took me all of 15 minutes and really wasn’t at all important compared to my actual job, but that’s what got appreciated.

More recently a ran a project that will save my company (over the course of 5 years) $16 million. We spent about half a million on the project. This is an incredible return on investment, and I put in a lot of hours (including some late weekend nights) to make it happen. Didn’t get a peep of recognition.

Meanwhile, I helped out another project by volunteering to take 4, eight-hour shifts to essentially check the status of some ongoing activities and report any issues. I took comp time for this, so it really wasn’t a sweat. I received lots of praise and recognition for being a “team player”.

I’m sure George Church can relate- he works hard on really ground-breaking stuff, and the vast majority of people never know his name or who he is until some little off-hand comment he makes gets mis-reported in a German newspaper, and causes a huge splash (even a Drudge link, which is possibly the biggest of all Internet splashes).

So we’ll call this the Hoeven mis-recognition principle: The harder and better you work on really important things, the more likely it is that they’ll be ignored and you’ll gain recognition for something comparitively trite.

If you’re saying he has some culpability for not making sure it was always clear this was not a near-term project, I agree. The omission of the fact that we’re not even close to reconstituting a Neanderthal genome or creating cells containing said genome is a pretty major omission, and a lot of the chatter last week basically gave the impression that all he was waiting for was a woman to raise her hand.

Consider Jonathan Brookes’ new novel, “Relic”, a fast paced science fiction thriller that explores the possibility of resurrecting and weaponizing an extinct species (Neanderthals). The intriguing storyline shares some fascinating anthropological and biological insights while also contemplating moral questions raised by genetic engineering.

Imagine a scenario in which some rogue, black-ops faction of the military attempts to clone Neanderthals in order to create a superior soldier. This rogue military group, working with a military contractor, inadvertently unleash a past that should have remained extinct. The novel explores the social and moral issues of such a project, as well as worst case scenarios of a covert military project gone awry.

Both the paperback and Kindle editions of the novel are available at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/author/jonathanbrookes

Going to modify a quote but the spirit is the same. People are more willing to believe a fantastic lie than the boring truth. It is a generalization with a wide paint brush I’ll admit but perspectively it seems to fit the general public and it does not have national borders, ethnic limits, or the confines of gender. Yes, it is a wide paint brush with some truth to it. Just look at social media sites and the media in general. Most of the printed news is going the way of the dinosaur because most or print media cannot regurgitate an original story as quickly as a cut & pasted one with additions to the story by the blogger (that is all most journalist are these days… bloggers). Mostly though if you’ll notice the key words needed to define the story/report are omitted and not too rarely added for “spice.” The more people that read the regurgitated story… the more people see the advertisements that are driving that news medias stories (bloggers).

Human brains are really magnificent that sometimes it aims to reach things even in the farthest. I hope geniuses would able to use their brains in something which is worth-while rather than spending much time and efforts creating humans clones which are certainly a not so good idea. I’m not saying I’m against but just that I’m afraid for the time to come into the world that you and I have five clones behind our backs.